Teaching through and with decolonial love in a neoliberal South African University

Abstract

The public university in South Africa continues to propagate capitalist, competitive and neoliberal agendas that are inconsistent with agendas that could be considered to be of public good. These market-orientated logics and discourses have compromised teaching in the university because of increased casualisation of faculty as a result of cost cutting and commodification of education meant to realise artificial efficiency. This has meant that faculty are now confronted with larger class sizes to teach and less support in the process. This approach to teaching has framed the academic project as an individual pursuit rather than a collective one. Thus, the academic project has been reduced to a project that only generates unequal and impossible expectations. In this article, aided by coloniality and decoloniality as my preferred philosophical orientations, I propose decolonial love as one transformative pedagogical approach that university teachers can employ in the implementation of their mandate, which is to teach and educate students for the epistemic, human, social and public good. I argue that such an approach to teaching would and can contribute to the promotion of transgression of knowledge boundaries for knowledge co-construction and thus enable a way of teaching that promotes pluriversal (situated) knowledges.

Contribution: I also assert that by employing decolonial love as a pedagogical approach, university teachers can come to value what their students bring to their lecture rooms and thus use cultural heritage of their students to develop innovative pedagogies that are culturally relevant and also underpinned by a pedagogy rooted in love.